Mysteries of Water: the Strange Water Bridge

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Water is the most abundant of substances on earth and the most vital.  it can form and destroy life.  Yet it has puzzled the scientists!  Beyond its basic form of H2O, scientists have not been able to decipher why it would behave in various ways that it does.  Here is another discovery!

When water in two beakers is subjected to a high dc electrical field.. it seems to come out of the beakers and form a bride between the two beakers!  The act seems to defy gravity.

Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.

To start with the electrostatic charges form the bridge.  But them somehow the electric field goes "inside" the water and helps steady the bridge!  The scientists surmise that a highly ordered microstructure is formed within the water that results in keeping the bridge together!  And that is not all – there are oscillations happening inside water and it is not caused by surface tension!!

In their experiments, the scientists also discovered the existence of high frequency oscillations inside the bridge, and they observed corresponding inner structures with a high-speed camera and visualization system. Unlike the much slower surfaces waves, these high frequency oscillations weren’t caused by surface tension. Rather, the scientists predict that the oscillating structures were triggered by the waviness of the voltage supply itself.
The researchers noticed a pattern with the inner structures: every experiment started with a single inner structure, which then decayed into additional structures after a few minutes of operation. The group thought that this decay might be caused by either dust contamination or the increasing temperature of the water bridge under the electric field. As the water temperature increased from 20 degrees Celsius to more than 60 degrees Celsius—which took about 45 minutes—the bridge collapsed.

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